Dracula was a European, of course : )
[ot]
I was actually referring to the first May letter of the title; “LETTER, LUCY WESTENRA TO MINA MURRAY” I should have been more clear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Westenra the book is entitled ‘Dracula’. I was going to edit it for clarity but had to feed some beasts. :)[/ot]
Though we can conclude clock-time (although generally considered linear) can be expressed in various ways thus the ABBR may be more important than you at first think…
I don’t quite understand that. Do you mean indicating 5:31 clearly?
(Ah well, technically any time betwixt 5 and 6 is in the 6th hour, anyway. That’s why I hate talk of “the 11th hour” as referring to the last minute. But there’s still a whole hour to go after that… called the 12th hour. Not to mention all those twats who celebrated the new century in the year 2000…)
Let alone the new millenium… 
Ah heck, did I miss that? 
(O well, there’s always … next … time. 
)
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no
under what circumstances, and please give specific examples, would a.m. and p.m. ~not~ be interpreted in their usual way?
The meeting took place in 2000 A.M., when referring to a meeting that took place in 1760 BCE.
Granted, given a context, it’s unlikely that there would be any confusion, and if we apply strict grammatical interpretation the sentence above is not really ambiguous, but there is a theoretical risk of ambiguity 
and you would, of course, to remove all confusion and ambiguity, code this as
<p>The meeting took place in 2000 [COLOR="Red"]<abbr title="ante meridiem">A.M.</abbr>[/COLOR]</p>
bzzzzzt, i’m sorry, that emperor don’t gots no clothes
thanks for playing, please try again
I am.
That solves your reply of “no” reply quite eloquently (which was also an abbreviation). There is little point in even trying to outmanoeuvre me; it just won’t work and would only be beneath ourselves and wasting your “time” fishing.
outmanoeuvre you? when you wander into the felgall territory of utter preposterous silliness, i wouldn’t dream of making the effort to outmanoeuvre you…
for example: what exactly is “no” an abbreviation of?
No is an abbreviation of Yes, of course!
I was actually writing A.M. as an abbreviation for Anno Mundi, not Ante Meridiem. Thus ‘in’, rather than ‘at’. But I could probably construct a sentence which would be completely ambiguous.
I’m not saying that I would necessarily use abbr for a.m./p.m. I would usually not use a.m./p.m. in the first place, unless I quoted someone else. It would, however, be logical to use abbr rather than span if you wanted to apply an aural style so that the letters are read individually (if written as am/pm).
hey, that’s a great example, christian 
if i actually did wish to use an abbreviation for Anno Mundi, then i think i would use ABBR with the appropriate title attribute, if only to make sure that it wasn’t incorrectly interpreted as Ante Meridiem
oh wait…
actually, i wouldn’t
Anno Mundi is obscure enough that i would actually spell it out, so the whole idea of using ABBR for A.M. would be moot
and i agree about your point that ABBR would be better than SPAN
under what circumstances, and please give specific examples, would a.m. and p.m. ~not~ be interpreted in their usual way?
Bizzare question. This thread didn’t explain to you why many Engrish speakers wouldn’t understand those??